Collecting & Processing Credit Card Payments

Once in a while a student asks me about how to collect and process payment information online using either their Microsoft Access database or their website.

For my business, I use PayPal for this. Not only do I accept Paypal payments but they also handle my credit card processing. They have a service called Payflow Pro and all you have to do is collect the user's information then you perform a Web API post to their server using a little bit of VBA code. Their server will reply with the approval or decline. It's not that hard to set up.

PayPal also has a few another services. One is called Payflow Gateway where you can use whatever credit card merchant processor you want, and they just act as an intermediary. Another is called Payflow Link where you give the user a link which takes them to PayPal to complete the transaction. This is what I first set my website up with. This way you don't have to collect any credit card data and worry about security issues. PayPal handles it all. However, if you want to do recurring billing (like memberships) then you have to set that up on PayPal as well.

As far as processing credit card transactions online goes you can do pretty much the same thing with ASP or any other web programming language but ASP is the one that I know. You simply collect the user's information and do a background post to PayPal's server and again it will reply with a decline or approval.

As far as setting up your website with SQL Server, connecting to your Access database and all of that jazz, I do have a seminar that covers that part of it: Access SQL Server Online. As far as posting data to the web and getting a response from a server, I cover using a web API to do this in Access Developer 32. These two things will get you about 95% of the way there.

The code is almost exactly the same in ASP as it is in Access and PayPal has coding examples and different integration libraries available on their website to help you get it working with your website.

I have not covered specifically setting up payment processing mostly because I don't want to be responsible for the liability. There are a lot of regulations both here in the United States and abroad when it comes to accepting payments online. You have to make sure you've got SSL security set up, and a host of other minutiae. While I've done my best to ensure that my site is secure, I don't want to give someone the wrong advice or the wrong information or have them change the regulations in a year and then I have to redo everything. It's one thing if I do something wrong on my website. It's another thing if I've taught a thousand people how to do something wrong on their websites. And although what I have built has been working fine for me for the past 10+ years, things like this change everyday.

So far, not that many people have asked about payment processing with Access or websites so it hasn't been on my priority list to make a seminar for it. However, if you are interested in learning how to set this up, let me know. Post a comment below. If enough people want to learn this, I will make a seminar for it. I could see possibly making two different seminars; one for Access alone, and another for ASP. I know some people just want to keep their customer credit card data offline and process it using their in-house Access database. It's more secure, and it's easier to implement. Other people want to be able to process transactions directly on their websites. So let me know what you're looking to do, and I can tailor the seminar(s) accordingly.

Your thoughts? Post below.

RR